After visiting the United States to see the new civic landscaping projects of designers like Frederick Law Olmstead in the years after World War I, Brenda Colvin returned to England and transformed the surrounding landscapes of power stations, new reservoirs, industrial sites, new towns, factories, and national parks. She also worked on many private gardens, and her simple and natural planting style, her ecological approach, and her championship of the role and profession of the landscape architect have proved her lasting legacy. Trish Gibson, a garden journalist and columnist with her own publicly viewable garden, draws on Colvin's personal notebooks and uses many of her previously unpublished photographs and plans for this book.

"The first full account of Colvin's life and work, and it is a large, meticulously researched and beautifully presented book, generously illustrated with plans and pictures of the work, as well as many of Colvin's own photographs. It's a book for anyone interested in the evolution of landscape design in the last century, but it also deserves to be more widely read in this design-led age, as a reminder of the principles behind what Colvin called landscapes 'worth living in'."—Hortus